Meta plans to sell targeted ads based on data in your AI chats (techcrunch.com)

Meta announced it will start using data from user interactions with its AI products to target ads across Facebook and Instagram, updating its privacy policy by December 16 and notifying users soon. The change applies globally except in the EU, UK and South Korea where laws bar this use. Meta says over a billion people chat with Meta AI monthly, and those conversations—along with inputs from other AI features—will become another signal to build ad profiles. There is reportedly no opt-out, though the company says it will not use conversations about sensitive categories (religion, health, political views, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, philosophical beliefs, or trade-union membership) for ad targeting. Technically, Meta will ingest multimodal AI data (text, voice, images, video) from products including Meta AI, Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, the AI-video feed Vibes, and Imagine (image generation) to enrich personalization and ad delivery—but only when users are logged into the same account across products. Meta frames this as expanding the data stream that fuels its core ad business and model improvements; privacy-policy manager Christy Harris said systems to operationalize this are still being built. The move tightens Big Tech’s trend of monetizing free AI services (paralleling Google and OpenAI experiments) and raises regulatory and ethical concerns about cross-product tracking, data use for model training, and user control.